Joe looked like he was going to puke – not from touching me, as he kept his hands safely in place – but from whatever internal state all of this generated for him.
“You OK?” I asked, sliding my palm against his cheek. “It’s OK.”
His eyes were skittish and skirted all over, finally resting on Trevor. “Is it?”
“I don’t know,” Trevor said, honestly. “I just know that I’m not jealous and I’m not wicked pissed. I feel like I should feel those things…but I don’t, so I’m not going to pretend to feel something I don’t feel.”
“Why not? That’s what I always do,” Joe ventured. “That’s how I get through the day.”
“You don’t have to do that here,” Trevor said, squeezing his shoulder. He looked around the nasty hallway at the back of the bar, its exit light blown out, cobwebs in the corners and some stain of undetermined origin on the dropped ceiling taking over, seeming to grow through like a mold or a cancer. “Right here, Joe, who would have thought? Here you don’t have to feel anything you don’t really feel and here you don’t have to reject anything just because you think you’re supposed to follow some kind of rule that tells you so.”
A cloud of magic filled the air, enveloping us in it – not literally, of course. If that were the case this would be a Harry Potter mystery, only with lots of sex.
“Trevor. Hey, Trev!” Mike’s boozy voice echoed down the hallway. “You’re up.”
The three of us pulled apart and Trevor looked solemnly at me and then Joe. “We can all find a way to make this work,” he said.
What did that mean? Was he giving Joe and me permission to sleep together? Was he proposing some sort of threesome? I guess that some people do that but around here…I tried to keep my mind open. I couldn’t know what he was thinking and right now Jerry was up on stage shouting, “Last call for Trevor!”
Trevor sprinted, bounding up the steps to take center stage with a lightness in his foot I’d never seen. Joe respected the fact that I’d come in holding one man’s hand and probably shouldn’t leave holding another’s. Plenty of that happened here – but not in quite the same way. Uncle Mike would be suspicious and I didn’t need Mama asking me any more questions or trying to pretend to be a parent again.
Trevor
“How is everybody tonight?” I called out. Darla and Joe cheered, but the rest were fairly muted. Undeterred, I kept going. Working a lukewarm crowd was no big deal. The stage felt like a high school assembly room, loud and thunky under my feet. The acoustics in here absolutely sucked, but there was a basic microphone and I could strum a borrowed guitar. Two songs and Darla would be happy.
Plus I had a surprise for her.
“My name is Trevor Connor and I play for a band back in Boston, Massachusetts.” Cold silence. “We call ourselves Random Acts of Crazy.” Eyerolls. “I know you’ve never heard of me, and that’s cool. Give me a break, though – at least I’m a Red Sox fan and not the Pirates.” A few snickers. Better than nothing.
“So I’ll just shut up and sing, even if I’m not a Dixie Chick.” A low rumble of chuckling and a few more bodies came over and sat in the chairs sprinkled around tables at the front of the stage. “This is our band’s most popular song, which means seven people have heard it. It’s called ‘I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.’”
The opening chords made me feel like I was right at home. Throat was fine – I’d practiced a little while Darla was at work – and this place had no harsh lights, no sound operations, nothing. It was great – me, my voice, and my guitar.
That, and Darla, was all I really needed right now.
Oh, I wasted
my only answered prayer
on a woman
who didn’t believe in God….
The first verse came out slow, with a little touch of country I’d never added before, more a ballad than a rock anthem. Joe sat up straight and zeroed in on me, like an animal hearing something new in a field, attuning to it to figure out what it was. Darla’s face was in a place of complete rapture, hair framing her face in soft curls, her eyes on me and her body loose and relaxed. The ebb and flow of her chest as it rose and fell from her breathing captivated me as I hit the chorus.
At one she walked away
At two she said no
At three she said please
At four she said more
Darla’s lips were mouthing the words, singing along with me, while Joe’s foot tapped out the beat. His fingers knew the bass line and I wished we had the entire band here. The crowd grew slowly around me, and soon people were nodding their heads, tapping feet, and drumming their beer bottles with fingers.
Gotcha. It made me dig in deeper and find more of my soul to pour into the song, my fingers on the fret and my heart on stage. Here I was the real Trevor Connor, the real naked soul for everyone to devour and share, to assimilate me into their consciousness and to go to a place where notes and chords combined created pure bliss.
As the song ended, and I stretched out the last few words, “…didn’t believe…”, the crowd went wild. OK, about as wild as fifty or so flannel-shirted rednecks could be for some overeducated punk from Massachusetts.
It was better than great.
“Encore! Encore!” someone shouted. It was Mike, raising his cup of coffee and calling for more. Mike! I’d won the big old lump over. Fuck yeah! Darla was clapping and jumping and bouncing in all the right places, her face beaming. For me. For my music.
For us.
I had something for her, too. As the crowd died down I put out my hands and said, “All right, all right. You convinced me. I have an original that I’m debuting right here, right now.”
A frown crossed Darla’s face. “I wrote it today,” I explained. “It’s a tale about…well, it speaks for itself.” Joe looked at Darla, then me, and a strange sort of smile changed his face. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. Most of the time he was irritated, but this didn’t look like any expression I’d ever seen on his face.
Grabbing a chair, I adjusted the mic down so I could do this one sitting. A few people held up smartphones and Joe scrambled to get his out of his pocket. That made me nervous – brand new song I’d never practiced with a guitar? I picked some basic chords and stuck to those, hoping the lyrics were good enough to not humiliate myself.
Why was I so worried?
They were. So I began:
Your Mama told you to watch out for me
Your God told you to walk away
Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone
And you weren’t sure what to say
The night you found me, wandering and lost
Naked by the side of the road
My guitar shattered, my body bereft
You fought everything you were told
And the chorus:
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
You have to stop and pause
You can turn away and never look back
But it will yank you back, because
Random acts of crazy draw you in
Random acts of kindness draw you in
Random acts of love draw you in
A hushed, glowing silence filled the room, couples leaning on each other, a few people holding up lighters like at a big concert, people swaying to and fro at the beat. My heart was in my throat. I was more naked right now than I had been two days ago when Darla found me.
And when I looked at her face as I strummed a few chords to give my throat a few seconds of rest, I saw all the random acts of love I needed.
Darla
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Trevor was singing about me. About us. He had written a song for me. For me! Jerry’s turned into a wonderland in that moment, something so familiar and so surreal, for my favorite singer and the man I was falling for wrote me a love ballad and sang it – premiered it! – in our little local shithole and he wrote it for me!
Have I mentioned the part where he wrote me a God damned song?
Joe reached over and clasped my hand, our fingers intertwining. It wasn’t threatening; tears in his eyes told me he was moved, too, by Trevor’s song and seemed to be seeking some sort of connection, perhaps to spread the emotion around a bit. This was a loving, touching song that made the room change, made me change – made me feel like everything I’d experienced the past two days had been guided by the hand of fate.
Trevor felt it, too. And now Joe felt something that made him bridge the chasm between us, made him seek me out for emotional redemption.
Trevor finished the chorus and everyone sang it with him, the room filled with mostly working class shlumps all singing Random acts of crazy draw you in…. And when Trevor sang the last line, on the word love his eyes locked with mine, opening a thousand dimensions and tens of thousands of possibilities deep within, the roar of the cheering crowd and the scent of beer, aftershave and cigarettes fading out into a cloud of nothing but me and Trevor.
Joe squeezed my hand and smiled, his face so open and different from the man he’d been just hours ago. The room was like a lovefest, a happy, rowdy group of people I’d known my entire life charmed and impressed by a man I’d known for two days – and who I wished I could know for a lifetime.
Hot breath on my ear made my heart race even faster, my throat closing with the suddenness of Joe’s heated presence against my neck. “He’s right. Random acts of love draw us all in.” His thumb began to stroke the back of my hand, each caress like a tidal wave of nerve endings throughout all the newly swelling parts of me. “And you’re the random act of everything, Darla.”
Trevor began to climb offstage, finding Steve and giving him back his guitar. I saw the younger man talking excitedly with Trevor, and that made me choke up, knowing that Steve was learning from and even being a tiny bit role-modeled by Trevor. All these different parts of my life were touchstones in a never-ending (I hoped, viscerally, suddenly, breathlessly) game of tag, each person responsible for passing on another little piece of love and hope that would resonate through tough times, lending light in darkness.
Trevor
Darla. I needed Darla now. The thrumming power of being on stage was like an aphrodisiac that made me love the crowd, but the lyrics I wrote and performed were all for her, and she was all I wanted now. Kissing that mouth and smothering her sharp tongue with my own, hands full of her curvy ass, our bodies smashed together and sweaty, grinding out the fear and the hesitation and the –
There she sat, holding Joe’s hand, his face next to her ear, whispering.
Two different Trevors responded, both devils inside me.
One said: He’s stealing her.
The other said: You can share her.
To this day I have no idea why I listened more to the latter, ignoring the former with such ease it felt fake, as if I were sublimating the thought because it was too hard to consider. Bullshit.
Joe let go of her hand and stood, and Darla threw herself at me, squee-ing like a fangirl. Her words were unintelligible but somehow I managed to catch words like I can’t believe and That was incredible and Holy fucking shit you wrote me a song.
My legs were tired and my throat parched, so we squeezed into the booth across from Mike, while Joe wisely grabbed a chair from an abandoned table and positioned himself at the end. He looked at me with a cagey expression, trying to size up what all of this meant.